Generally speaking, the technology related to Internet browser cookies is relatively simple. The use of cookies makes it easy for users to browse web pages. Nearly all mainstream website designers use cookies for providing a better browsing environment to website users and for collecting more accurate information of website visitors. Practically, a cookie is a piece of text stored in a user computer by a web server. Cookies allow a website to save information in the user computer for later retrieval.
Specifically, cookies allow the website server to store data in a hard drive or a cache of a user's computer, or read data from the user's computer. For example, when a user browses a certain website, the web server providing that website may place a very small text file in that user computer. The file may record such information as the user's ID, password, browsed web pages and respective browsing durations. This text file is referred to as a cookie. When the user visits this website again, the website reads the cookie in the user computer to learn of relevant information about the user. Based on this information, operations such as displaying a banner welcoming the user on the web page or allowing login directly without requiring the user to enter user ID and password may be performed accordingly. Essentially, a cookie may be considered as one's identification card. However, it should be noted that cookies are not executable and cannot spread viruses, being uniquely possessed by a given user. A web server can only obtain website-related information that the web server placed in the user computer previously, but is unable to obtain information about other websites from the cookie files of those other websites.
Generally, cookies have the following characteristics:                A) Cookies are strictly isolated according to domain names.        B) Cookies can be cleared easily.        C) Cookies are browser-specific.        D) Cookies are each valid for a given period of time.        
With the advent of electronic commerce, or e-commerce, investigation of information of user activities for the purpose of satisfying user needs is particularly important for website development from the perspectives of e-commerce websites. Cookies, being a tool of acquiring user information, have therefore become extremely important for e-commerce websites. However, the technical schemes of tracking and analyzing user activities using cookies with existing technologies tend to have the following problems:
1) The existence of any given cookie tends to be short because cookies are usually deleted on the user's end. Cookies may thus be constantly re-assigned to the same user, leading to fragmentation of data associated with user activities and severely affected analysis of user activities.
2) As cookies are isolated according to domain names, cookies cannot be placed under other third-party domain names.
Due to the above reasons, information of user activities obtained through cookies by e-commerce websites tends to be incomplete. Furthermore, the website-visiting behavior of a user may be easily segmented to be the behavior of multiple users, thus making analysis of user activities more complicated and resulting in inaccurate analysis results. To change this situation, the present disclosure provides a method and a system for accessing and storing cookies across domains in a user computer in order to provide more reliable references for analysis of user information by e-commerce websites.